There is great interest in exploiting the capabilities of the Internet World Wide Web (“Web”) by providing advertising to generate revenue for Web sites. A Web site is a grouping of one or more associated Web pages sharing a common domain. Each Web page is a document that is displayed as a single window of information. Web advertising is predominantly implemented through the use of banner advertisements on these Web pages. With the evolution of the Internet and the Web from an Academic to mainstream medium, advertising became a commercially feasible activity.
The birth of true Web-based advertising began in 1994 with a banner advertisement from AT&T™ on the “hotwired.com” Web site. A banner advertisement (hereinafter “banner”) is a graphic or image contained on either a Web page or a portion of a display screen and used for advertising. Since the pioneering AT&T™ advertisement, the banner has become the predominant form of Web advertising. From modest beginnings in 1994, the banner has today evolved into eight commonly accepted types and sizes as identified by the Standards and Practices Committee of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating the eight commonly accepted IAB types and sizes of banner advertisements. These categories are:
Type of BannerSize in PixelsMicro Button 170 88 × 31Button 150120 × 60Button 140120 × 90Square Button 160 125 × 125Vertical Banner 130 120 × 240Full Banner w/Vert. Navigation Bar 110392 × 72Half Banner 120234 × 60Full Banner 100468 × 60In addition to these commonly accepted banner types and sizes, countless customized implementations exist catering to the specific needs of advertisers and Web site owners. The growth of the banner can be attributed to both advertisers' demand for finding new ways of reaching their target audiences and the desire of Web site owners to raise revenue in order to pay for or profit from the maintenance of their Web sites.
In order to judge the effectiveness of a banner in reaching a desired demographic, various metrics have been developed. The Coalition for Advertiser Supported Information and Entertainment (CASIE) has published a glossary of Web marketing terms. In 1997, the Media Management Task Force of the IAB published voluntary guidelines for online advertising in their Metrics and Methodology document. Both are industry efforts to standardize the use of metrics in online advertising. The most frequently used metric for banner effectiveness is the click-through ratio (CTR). CTR is a ratio measuring the number of times a banner is clicked on to the number of times a banner is shown. For example, if a banner is clicked on 5 times out of the 100 times that the banner is shown, the banner has a CTR of 5:100 or 5%. Optimizing CTR is the focus of most Web advertising today and has led to further innovation in the field.
The problem with banners is that the Web has become so saturated with them that users have learned to tune them out. In order to compensate for this user disinterest, banner designers have become increasingly more innovative and have provided more stimulating content to the banners such as animation and video (e.g., rich media). These innovations are still designed to maintain or increase CTR and don't address a second problem with banners. Users often don't respond to banner advertisements or to hyperlinks (also known as “hypertext links”) because they know that clicking on either will result in them being moved to another Web site. Users are generally at a Web site because they want to view the content offered and often do not want to be moved to another Web site. For this reason, CTR remains constant or continues to drop as users are less inclined to click through to other Web sites. Therefore, displaying full advertising content without taking the user away from the current Web site and Web page is a need that has existed for quite some time and has not been adequately solved until the advent of the present invention.
In addition to Web-based advertising, the development of small-scale data display devices also presents a problem that has not been addressed. Small-scale display devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), Internet/Web-enabled phones, non-Web enabled phones with digital displays, and electronic books (e-books) have increased tremendously in availability but are still plagued by a limited display area. Conventional means have not overcome the limitations of this restricted display and the only way to present a greater amount of information is to provide scrolling within an application window (the window may be the screen display) or by displaying a new window of information. The present invention solves this need by providing an alternative method of reusing the display space without calling new windows or leaving the data already being displayed on the screen.
The problem faced by Web-advertisers in trying to maximize the screen space used without effecting the underlying content attracting a user to a Web page also arises in a non-advertising context. Many software applications and documents may benefit from reusing the screen display area to provide expanded information to a user without leaving the currently displayed underlying information. For example, an Adobe® Acrobat document containing a description of a new aircraft may not want to bog a reader down in details about the engines used by the new aircraft. Providing a means for displaying additional engine information (e.g., technical illustrations) to those readers wanting this additional information while avoiding this additional complexity for other readers where in both instances the underlying data remains available to the reader is clearly advantageous but not convenient in conventional embodiments of window-based software applications. The present invention solves this need by providing a convenient means for reusing the display space while still displaying the underlying window of a software application.